The Power Broker, Part I: The Idealist
Turns out Robert Moses was more fun to hang out with in college than one might expect!
The childhood bit of a biography is almost always dreary, the chore to slog through until the person hits puberty and things get spicy. Not this one, though! The beginning of The Power Broker reads like a super-villain origin story written by a Freudian.
Robert Caro starts his tale of Robert Moses with the stories of Moses’ parents and grandparents. I expected a book this thick to include this kind of background wind-up, but the content of the “meet the parents” section surprised me. The nature of Moses’ reputation as a megalomaniacal kingdom-builder had me assuming that he had probably really wanted to impress his dad. (Can’t explain it, just seemed like a daddy issues situation. See: T***p.) Nope! Dad’s a simp. Moses yearned to impress his mom.
Caro takes great pains to emphasize that Moses’ grandpa and dad were completely, totally, borderline-anachronistically whipped by their domineering, rude wives. “The way Grannie Cohen treated Grandfather Cohen was quite striking,” a Moses grandchild tells Caro. “She absolutely sat on him.”
She absolutely sat on him!
One of the most enjoyable parts of reading about people who lived long ago is getting a gentle reminder that they were living, breathing, frequently badly-behaved humans, and not stuffy, moralizing bores just because they didn’t smile in photographs and wore calico (?) all the time and didn’t know about antibiotics. Even in 1870s New York’s upper class enclaves, bossy old broads with rotten attitudes careened around screwing with everyone. In addition to emotionally cucking her husband, Grannie Cohen also refused to wait in line, instead preferring to walk straight to the front and elbow whoever was in her way. Legend.
After he introduces the readers to wicked ole Granny C., we meet her equally imperious daughter, Bella, who marries a “gentle” man named Emanuel Moses and proceeds to have three children, including Robert. Caro gives a zippy recap of Moses’ childhood—he lived in “snug luxury,” he was an arrogant nerd, and, ah, yes—he was obsessed with his mean mom. Bella was deeply involved with philanthropic work; her charity, Madison House, offered lodging, meals, and medical care to new Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and pushed them to assimilate. As Caro tells it, Bella was genuinely passionate about helping people, but also “never forgot that the lower classes were lower.” Her competent project-management was shot through with patronizing certainty that she knew best for everyone.
And Robert thought she was perfect. He parroted all her viewpoints, and even adopted her mannerisms. “In later decades, when Robert Moses was famous almost as much for his personality as for his achievements, observers would marvel at the depth and degree of his outspokenness, stubbornness, aggressiveness and arrogance. They would wonder at the origin of the mold in which he had been formed in so hard a cast. But relatives and friends of the Moses family never wondered,” Caro writes. “The quality was one that they had watched being passed, like a family heirloom, from Robert Moses’ grandmother to his mother to him.”
Caro doesn’t linger over the childhood psychodrama too much, though. He establishes the mama’s boy motivation and then scoots Moses over to Yale.
The ensuing sub-section could also be called Moses: The College Years. It’s mainly a character sketch of Moses as an undergraduate in New Haven and studying for his doctorate at Oxford. Caro seems surprised that Moses was beloved on campus, known for his good personality as much as his scholarship. “He enjoyed jokes—telling them and hearing them—and he had a quick, infectious laugh. Tall and strong, he enjoyed running and mountain climbing, once leading several friends to the top of Whiteface Mountain and the Adirondacks.”
Unfortunately, Moses wasn’t only hot and sporty. He was already a bit of a dickhead. Part of the reason Moses felt compelled to serve the public was the strong belief in noblesse oblige he learned first from his mother and then from Oxford’s snobby halls. He quit the swim team in a huff that was ostensibly a principled stance about sports funding but was really mostly about being spiteful. He devoted part of his doctorate thesis to trashing unions. Even as Caro stresses that Moses truly did want to do good for the public, he also makes it clear that Moses never saw himself of the public. He was Bella’s son, and he’d make his impact from above.
After Oxford, Moses trades academia for his first job at a fact-finding organization in Manhattan. “One day in the summer of 1913, dressed in his clean white suit, Robert Moses carried his bright, shining idealism down to 261 Broadway and flung it on the table to find out what it was worth in the game of life,” Caro writes to close the section. It’s clear that white suit is about to get muddied….